Playwright LaDarrion Williams’ ‘Coco Queens’ Puts a Queer Black Woman at the Center of 1975 Alabama

The Beauty Shop Is Open! LaDarrion Williams’ new play brings four Black women, old secrets and plenty of Southern history into Gloria’s neighborhood beauty shop for a limited Los Angeles run through Nov. 17 at the Outside In Theatre Artspace.

If you know what can happen inside a Black beauty shop, you already know four women, a weekend together and years of unfinished business could get interesting quickly.

That is where playwright LaDarrion Williams takes us in Coco Queens, his new play.

Set in Alabama in 1975, the play follows four Black women who return to Gloria Carmichael’s neighborhood beauty shop each year for Coco Queens Weekend. They eat, play music, laugh and catch up. Then old secrets start coming out.

LaDarrion Williams, a queer Black playwright from Helena, Alabama, is also a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. His Blood at the Root trilogy centers Black Southern characters, with the final book, Ashes at the Altar, published in September.

Across his books and plays, Williams keeps returning to Black Southern characters, their histories and the people they call family.

“Coco Queens is about the spaces we create for one another when the world becomes too heavy,” Williams said of the play.

In Coco Queens, that space is a beauty shop.

One chair. Then another. Somebody talking while somebody else gets their hair done. Somebody remembering something differently than everybody else in the room.

Gloria runs the shop where these women return every year, and they know one another well enough to remember things she might rather leave alone. She loves women and has built a life in 1975 Alabama, deep in the Black Bible Belt, with a business of her own and a place in her community. Gloria has also made mistakes. Some of the hurt between these women comes from choices she made, and some of those relationships still need repair. The women around her know all of those parts of Gloria, including who she loves.

For Black queer audiences, Gloria may feel familiar: a queer Black woman living a full life in the South in 1975, surrounded by people who know her history and still call her theirs.

Come for the tea.

Stay for what happens once everybody starts telling the truth.

Julanne Chidi Hill plays Gloria, joined by Mildred Marie Langford as Chanel Hudson, Chanell Copeland as Tammie Faye Allen and Sierra Nicolette Smith as Dawn Lyons. Jessica E. Williams directs the Los Angeles production.

Williams developed Coco Queens through the Sundance Institute’s 2019 Playwriting Intensive. The play later won the NewWorks@TheWorks Playwriting Award and received its world premiere at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis in 2024.

Coco Queens runs through Nov. 17 at Outside In Theatre Artspace, 5317 York Blvd. in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood.

Performances are scheduled Mondays, Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, with evening performances and select 3 p.m. matinees. Tickets range from $25 to $40.

Select performances also include pre- and post-show conversations with members of the production and community.

Written by: LaDarrion Williams
Directed by: Jessica E. Williams
Starring: Julanne Chidi Hill, Mildred Marie Langford, Chanell Copeland and Sierra Nicolette Smith

Tickets and performance information are available through Outside In Theatre.